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Teach the parents, too

As we look at how to teach children better, perhaps we are looking in the wrong direction. We focus on the children, which is indeed important. Yet, since study after study shows that the parents’ role is critical, it may be equally important to teach parents how to help their children in the right way.

As we look at how to teach children better, perhaps we are looking in the wrong direction. We focus on the children, which is indeed important. Yet, since study after study shows that the parents’ role is critical, it may be equally important to teach parents how to help their children in the right way.

As one indication, the Brookings Institution said “three decades of research have shown that parent training can improve developmental outcomes for children”. And the United Kingdom Department for Children, Schools and Families even said research showed that parental behaviour has a bigger effect than school quality on pupils’ attainment.

While the biggest benefits from teaching parents might seem to come from helping younger children, the advantages last all the way through secondary school and beyond. For very young children, for example, research by Head Start in the United States showed workshops for parents on helping their children at home were linked to higher reading and maths scores as well as greater gains in state tests.

Even at the secondary level, researchers like Johns Hopkins University programme director Joyce Epstein found that programmes such as parent-child reading activities produce a significant improvement in students’ language and reading skills.

FILLING THE GAP

Even though parents may think they know how to help their children, and indeed some do, a key challenge is that most simply do what they did when they were growing up to help their children, or ask friends and family rather than professional educators.

Minister for Education Heng Swee Keat acknowledged the issue earlier this year when he said in Parliament that “students enter primary school with different dispositions and readiness for learning”, often because there is a lack of home and parental support for learning. Parents do not know how to help, or they are preoccupied with making ends meet.

While continuing to improve classroom techniques to provide better learning opportunities is important, perhaps it’s time to do more to teach parents how to give their children support.

Even if making parental education mandatory isn’t feasible — beneficial though it might be — developing top-notch parent education programmes and promoting them so effectively that parents really want to participate could help. Making family benefits for at-risk students dependent on participating in these programmes could make even more of a difference.

The Ministry of Education (MOE) does provide some programmes for parents, though often more as orientation schemes such as the Transition to Secondary Education seminar. There is talk about doing more, but for now the range of programmes seems limited and parents may find it difficult to learn about them, even on MOE’s Parents in Education website.

An increasing number of private organisations have stepped into the gap and started offering classes for parents. Focus on the Family offers Parenting with Confidence, for example, and MCYC Community Services Society has brought in the renowned Triple P programme from Australia.

INTERACTIVE HOMEWORK?

Schools could see vast improvements in students’ learning if they offered classes for parents in a more structured way and make participation matter. In Cleveland, Ohio, for example, parents can go to primary school once a month to read with their children and talk with teachers about reading strategies.

The Southwest Educational Development Laboratory suggests strategies such as interactive homework that involves parents in their children’s learning, such as the Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork (TIPS) programme in Baltimore, Maryland.

The Australian Family-School and Community Partnerships Bureau suggests changing family attitudes and practices through ensuring that parental involvement is fully integrated into schools’ development plans, and having schools develop an action team to reach out to parents and the community.

Programmes here could target everyone from at-risk children through high achievers — perhaps even with targeted content for different groups that takes into account research by scholars such as University of Exeter Emeritus Professor Charles Desforges, which shows that there can be differences in parental involvement associated with social class, poverty, health and parental confidence.

To achieve the maximum benefit, then, some parent education programmes could be developed for all parents, while others could be targeted to specific groups such as at-risk families who need more basic skills — or overly demanding parents who need to scale back their pressure and focus on positive involvement.

As Stanford University Professor Sean Reardon wrote recently in The New York Times, “there is a lot of discussion these days about investing in teachers and ‘improving teacher quality’, but improving the quality of our parenting and of our children’s earliest environments may be even more important”.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Richard Hartung is a consultant who has lived here since 1992.

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